Many small to medium sized business organizations have a network infrastructure to allow software product distribution by a network administrator. Software products may be installed on the client by the network administrator by manually installing the program on each client. Such installation is very time consuming and tedious. A network administrator may also use a software deployment technology to advertise available software for download to a client. Such deployment comes from a central server and is less time consuming than manual installation because software products may be advertised to a plurality of clients at one time.
Advertising is a method by which a software product is prepared and allowed to become installable on a machine. Some operating systems have support for “advertising” software products which are packaged in a single product installer format. Single product installers facilitate the installation of the software product on a client via a software deployment technology. In such a situation, the single product installer bundles both the application binaries and application specific resources. Thus, many software deployment technologies only deploy a single product installer to a client during software distribution. An operating system may natively support installing these single product installer software packages to computers which are joined to, for example, a managed Active Directory Domain. This technology is called Group Policy Software Installation (GPSI).
Software products may also be programmed with multiple product installers. In such a situation, one product installer may include the application binaries and multiple other installers may include the application specific resources. In the past, software deployment technologies that can only deploy a single product installer cannot facilitate advertisement of software products that are programmed with multiple product installers to a managed computer, for example on the Active Directory Domain.